


there was once a large family

by Serindrana



Category: Dishonored (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-23
Updated: 2013-09-23
Packaged: 2017-12-27 11:23:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/978270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Serindrana/pseuds/Serindrana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Uncle, in the blackness I feel at ease. You once told me I was a good child, who never cried from monsters in the dark. Night is a scary time, you told me, because people who do not want to be seen are about then.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>Perhaps I do not wish to be seen, either.</i>
</p><p>--</p><p>Callista Curnow is cursed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	there was once a large family

The shipwreck left her stranded on a rocky island, twenty days at sea away from Gristol. When she woke on the shore, half-drowned but still alive, she had stared up at the rolling clouds and the distant circling birds, and she had cried. Even the sea had given her up. Even the sea had wanted nothing of her.

The sun had risen high above her, and when the tide receded, it had burned her skin and dried her clothes to salt-stiff planks of fabric. She stayed where she was, letting the skin of her face turn pink, then red, letting the sun leave dark holes in her vision that she couldn't blink away.

 _Uncle_ , she thought, as if composing one of the many letters she'd only penned since he had died, _there is nothing left to me. I will burn away here, because I did not drown. Isn't that enough?_

Dunwall was twenty days behind her. Around her there was no wreckage. Wherever her ship had gone to, to the bottom of the ocean or to another shore, it was not with her. Hunger gnawed at her.

As the sun descended and the waves began to lap grudgingly at her heels once more, Callista Curnow stood.

She made herself a bed that first night in a circle of rocks, above the waterline, away from where the mussels opened beneath the tide and the anemones blossomed in the surf. She barely slept. She still tasted the salt-tang of water and the bitterness of crab lungs on her lips and tongue. She was thankful that below her the ground no longer pitched and rolled, but its solidity was more frightening still.

When last she'd stood on land, the sound of waves a near companion, she had been stared down by five men and women holding guns, with masks over their faces and fear in their eyes. They had herded her onto a boat. She had gone without protest.

Perhaps they still lived.

When she rose in the morning, she was weak. She picked her way up the shore, up into the rocky hills, into the scrublands, into plains that were full of prickling leaves and sharp grass. She walked with her arms wrapped around her, her shoulders hunched forward. She had tried many ways, over the years, to shrink herself down to nothing. If she were nothing, she had thought, then nothing could touch her. The deaths that had left her house and bloodline distorted, then empty, could not touch her. But even the smallest remnant of her seemed to be a poison. Her mother's farm had withered and died shortly after she visited it in honor of what would have been her mother's thirtieth birthday. Her uncle had died because she had re-entered his life enough to ask somebody to spare his life.

The places she made her camps withered by morning. It was a subtle thing; the grass was not brown when she awoke, but if she had been a scientist, if she could have inspected the plants upon which she'd rested her head, she would have found them dead already. In a day, a week, she knew they would be blighted. Her path across the island would be marked in browns and greys.

She reached the highest point of land on her fourth day, her stomach empty except for scattered berries and bits of detritus. She had seen no people, no homes, no signs of anything beyond mice and birds that kept their distance. Her limbs quaked. She sat on the highest rock at the highest point of land, and she stared out.

 _Uncle, I have found a place where there is only air_ , she thought. _Instead of earth or smoke or water, there is only wind. But I do not feel free. I feel alone._

She did not see the shoreline, or the copses of trees dotting the landscape. Instead, she saw the cloud-darkened skies of Dunwall, and the stones of the Empress's tower. She saw her closed, curtained windows, and her sickbed. She saw Emily Kaldwin lying in her sheets, feverish, her child's cheeks sunken.

That was when they'd understood at last. The city had been dying for over a year by then, since long before a man drove a blade through Emily's mother's belly. The plague had come on rats, they'd thought, and perhaps it had. But there were no rats in the Tower, and though the best minds of the city had raced with all their resources to find a cure to no avail, they had all thought they were safe.

The maids sickened first.

Then the cook.

Then Emily.

Callista had sat in her sickroom. She sang to her. She read to her. She smoothed her hair from her fever-slicked brow, and when the girl had slept, she had cried with guilt. But Geoff had always told her that curses were a silly idea, remnants of her guilt, her loneliness, and she had wanted to believe them.

But on the day the guards dragged her from Emily's room, she didn't protest.

She'd been strapped into a chair where the Royal Academy had performed test after test on her blood. She heard them whisper that the Empress continued to sicken. She heard them whisper that more and more of their own were dying. They spoke of _acceleration_ and _undeniability_ and _something in her breath_. They put masks over her nose and mouth, covered her hands, scalded her with hot water and rubbed her raw with astringent soaps and scouring pads.

Soon the halls of the Academy grew quiet.

She had stopped apologizing years ago, but she took up the practice once more as she wandered the darkened buildings, alone except for the remnants of old experiments and the footsteps of the Watchmen who brought her food every two days. The baskets began full, and whole, but soon began to shrink. What had once been fine sausages and cheeses, gifts from an Empress who had once loved her, soon became rotted eel and moldering bread.

As Callista stared out unseeing at the ocean, she remembered the sight, every night, of more and more lights blinking out across the city.

She remembered the fires.

But it wasn't until she descended from the highest point on the island, making her way inexorably back to the shore, that she thought again of the five men and women who had put her on the ship out to sea. Corvo had been the only one she'd recognized. He had stared at her, grim and exhausted, a cough rattling in his chest. She had always looked upon him as death and life walking.

She had seen only a man that day.

Emily was dead. Dunwall was empty. Sometimes she wondered if those five people had been the only ones left alive in the whole city.

She had apologized.

The ship had been stocked with food, but no crew. It worked on a whale oil engine, and a route had been programmed into it. _To Pandyssia_ , Corvo had said, _where something like you belongs_. She had heard regret in his voice, and fear, and sorrow.

The ship had taken her across the waves. It had once been a whaling trawler. She'd wandered the whole of it, learned its lines, and wondered if, perhaps, it was what she had longed for all those years she had dreamed of being a whaler. But the leviathans did not come to greet her. The days were long and the nights longer. The rain was bitter and cold, the sun unrelenting.

For twenty days it crossed the water, until, at last, a storm had caught it up. Perhaps there had been a leviathan that night; she couldn't remember.

She thought of lying on the beach, thrown out of the ocean depths, unwanted.

The shore was littered with the bodies of dead fish, untouched by the gulls that no longer circled. She stared at them. She gathered their rotting bodies and she piled them in the circle of stones she had slept in, then heaped rock after rock upon them in some kind of cairn.

The tide came in. It lapped at her feet, blistered and bloody. She'd given up her shoes two days before; they had pinched at her and slid on rocks. They had not helped her. The water stung at each wound, and she stared at it.

"You don't want me," she said to it.

When the tide went out, she followed it down, staring out at the water. She wondered, if she walked into the surf, if it would simply spit her out again. She stood there until the trickle of water by her right foot grew too persistent to ignore, and she turned to see it leading up, up, into one of the caves carved by the pounding of the tides into the side of a small cliff.

She followed the stream in.

The rock was black and pitted, but smooth to the touch, and it was cool beneath the earth. She followed a path that sloped down and down, until there was no light left and she picked her way on shaking, weak limbs by touch alone. There was water down below her, roaring a song, and she followed it until the path fell off to open air.

She sat on the broken stone edge, feet dangling over nothingness.

_Uncle, in the blackness I feel at ease. You once told me I was a good child, who never cried from monsters in the dark. Night is a scary time, you told me, because people who do not want to be seen are about then._

_Perhaps I do not wish to be seen, either_.

In the darkness, something moved. There was no light to see it by, but if she looked from the corner of her eye, she was sure she saw a man, floating in the waves far below. He was lifeless, limp.

But then he rolled onto his back. His eyes were open, and dark. She saw a man who had once drowned, and though there was only blackness, she knew he wore a brown jacket, had close cropped dark hair, and that he smiled.

The water roared a song as the tide crashed in, miles above her head. The water raced down to her.

She let go, and allowed herself to fall into the Void.


End file.
